Mythos is a strange series, the purpose of which is not immediately evident.  Well, the artistic purpose, anyway.

Basically, it's a series of comics by Paul Jenkins and Paolo Rivera retelling the origins of Marvel superheroes.  It's apparently a miniseries, although for the life of me I can't track down any clear statement of how many issues it's supposed to run for.  Issue #1 is the X-Men, which is why it's here.

According to Jenkins' promotional interviews, the point is to try and bridge the gap between the origin stories presented in the comics and the ones presented in the movies.  I'm at a loss as to how this issue does that, or how this issue counts as an origin story (as opposed to a re-telling of X-Men #1, which wasn't an origin story).  But most importantly, although I can understand why Marvel would want to bridge the comics/movies gap for brand management purposes, I don't see how that translates into an interesting concept from the reader's point of view.

And beyond the brand management agenda, I'm honestly not clear what the point is supposed to be.  What we have here is, of sorts, a re-telling of X-Men #1, with Magneto taking over Cape Citadel and the X-Men going to save the day in their first mission.  As I've already noted, this isn't an origin story, nor does the issue make any real attempt to explain where the X-Men came from.  They're simply a bunch of mutants that Xavier has already recruited.

What Jenkins is actually doing here is rewriting X-Men #1 to try and give it more resonance with the themes that later came to dominate the series.  It's certainly true that, with the benefit of hindsight, X-Men #1 is deeply unsatisfactory as a first issue.  The main villain is a generic bad guy with magnet powers, the big ideas are absent, and ultimately it's just a big fight scene.  Jenkins has gone some way to fixing that, by declaring that Cape Citadel is secretly being used for some illegal government anti-mutant project, and wheeling Professor X down to the fight so that he and Magneto can deliver speeches at one another.  To this extent, it is an improvement.

But it's still ultimately a rewrite of X-Men #1, which wasn't very good to start with.  Creatively, if you're going to tinker with it, why not just go the whole way and replace it with something entirely different - something that would actually serve as an origin story or a starting point?  Despite the title of this series, the events of X-Men #1 aren't exactly significant to the team's mythos.  They can debut anywhere.

The art doesn't really work, either.  Rivera is providing painted art here, and the effect is simply rather muted and blurry.  The story doesn't flow very well, and there's a general lack of energy.  It's simply the wrong style for a straight-ahead action story, and one gets the nagging feeling that it's been chosen simply because of a perception that paint is classy.

Judged purely in isolation, it's not too bad, and in many respects it's an improvement on the original version of the same story.  But it also seems an utterly superfluous project on so many levels.  Who really needs yet another version of these old stories, with a few tweaks for marketing purposes?  I just don't see the point.

Rating: B-

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